Harris Exits Cloud Hosting, Citing Fed Server Hugging

miller60 writes "Despite the publicity around the U.S. Government's 'Cloud First' approach to IT, many agencies are reluctant to shift mission critical assets to third-party facilities. That's the analysis from Harris Corp., which has decided to get out of the cloud hosting business and sell a data center in Virginia, just two years after it spent $200 million to build and equip it. 'It's becoming clear that customers, both government and commercial, currently have a preference for on-premise versus off-premise solutions,' said Harris' CEO."

Re:Server Hugging

[hodet]

By fed server hugging the first thing I thought of was the fed having easy access to my servers. That would be a real concern for me if using an American cloud hosting provider, as I am not located in the US. Do these companies have any choice but to bend over to the government when they are told?

Re:They did not target startups and small business

[alphatel]

Harris targeted the wrong audience and/or they could not compete with Amazon.

You've nailed the main talking point. Cloud was where you went as an enterprise to get your data stored globally with access from anywhere. But as the internet has evolved, attacks on hosted solutions, both illegal (anonymous) and legal (feds, riaa, etc), have made jurisdiction and prudence competing factors.

If you're a startup you have none of these concerns - you're probably happy if you can find enough money to buy your best client lunch. Once you evolve from the penniless framework you, like every other growth business, will reinvest into locally stored/colocated data inside your infrastructure and outside prying fingers.